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Even if you’ve never driven a single stretch of US Route 20, Mac Nelson’s passion, wit and storytelling make you want to jump in the car and hit the road.
Nelson’s Twenty West: The Great Road Across America, released in May by SUNY Press, tells the many tales of America that occur along or near the country’s longest road — a 3,300-mile stretch of pavement that runs east to west across 12 states from Massachusetts to Oregon. From justice and freedom, to gods and mortals, to power and empire, each chapter in Nelson’s narrative takes the reader on a literary tour of American history, religion, literature, geography and art.
Why US 20?” many might question, arguing the route pales in comparison to Jack Kerouac’s US 6, or George Stewart’s US 40, or even Nat King Cole’s Route 66. To that, Nelson says, simply, “Piffle.”
“I know US 20, I live on it, grew up near it, commute to work on it and have run on it most mornings for 25 years,” according to Nelson, a distinguished teaching professor emeritus of English at SUNY Fredonia. “It has become the Main Street of my life. I am fond of it, and I want to tell its very American story.”
And so he does. After all, the sexagenarian admits he has spent a lifetime researching this particular manuscript. From his early days growing up near Route 20 in Chicago, to dozens of treks to Yellowstone National Park, to residing along The Great Road in Brocton, Nelson not only recounts memories and shares personal opinions along the way, he captures Americana — the good, the bad and the ugly — along the route that has long held him spellbound.
A SUNY Press summary captures its essence: “Twenty West is more than a mile-by-mile guidebook. (It) offers a glimpse of a boyish and very American fascination with the road that will entice the traveler in all of us to take the long way home.”
Nelson’s writing is conversational and inviting; informative with a little bit of the absurd mixed in.
“There is some cockamamie, off-the-wall stuff in here,” Nelson told The Voice. “It is not a scholarly book. It is breezy and idiosyncratic — it gets ridiculous at times.”
That’s not unusual for Nelson, who professes that most of his literary work is on “offbeat, underserved” subjects. One example: He coauthored (with Diana George Hume) Epitaph and Icon: A Field Guide to the Old Burying Grounds of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket (Parnassus Imprints, 1983).
He isn’t looking for fame or fortune. So unassuming is Nelson that he refused to allow SUNY Press to print his given name — Malcolm — on the jacket. “They grumbled a little, saying I am a ‘distinguished teaching professor,’” he said. “I said ‘I’m Mac.’”
Nelson said he chooses these topics because “they excite me and I like to share my enthusiasm.”
At no time is his enthusiasm more evident than at the start of UUP Delegate Assemblies, when he and a handful of other delegates lead members in singing the labor anthem Solidarity Forever. Nelson moves among the assembled, waving his arms above his head in his call to join the chorus. His enthusiasm is heartfelt — and contagious.
That’s why it comes as no surprise that Nelson relates the connection between unionism and The Great Road. He writes of the rise and fall of Brocton native George Pullman, the early 19th century “grand railroad magnate, town founder and union buster.”
Pullman’s “American Utopian experiment” — building a rail-car empire and a “model town” for his workers — would ultimately fail (no one likes to be “aristocratically ruled”), Nelson said. Pullman made a questionable business decision when he slashed wages without cutting rents or prices at company-owned stores.
“The workers began organizing, oh horror, a labor union,” Nelson wrote, adding parenthetically, “I’m a faculty union leader. A dean once wanted to fire me for union uppittiness. He failed. He left. I stayed. ‘Solidarity forever,’ say I.”
When asked if his book about The Great Road parallels his life, Nelson pondered, then said: “I suppose so, in that the road always beckons to me and so does life, which I’ve had a wonderful trip in. And if The Great Road stands for freedom and inquiry and creativity, sure, that’s the road I’d like to think my life has been on.”
—Karen L. Mattison