Author Patrick Dobson - Seldom Seen
Interview
Patrick Dobson
Meet author Patrick Dobson, who wrote the recently published travelogue Seldom Seen, after walking from Kansas City to Helena, Montana in 1995. Dobson recorded a remarkable portrait of people, sights, and experiences in the Great Plains that make up "our America."
Patrick Dobson is a freelance writer, award-winning journalist, and a working member of Ironworkers Local #10 in Kansas City, MO. He is pursuing his doctorate in U.S. environmental history and American literature at the University of Missouri–Kansas City.
Present: How far did you walk and how long did it take?
Dobson: I walked the majority of the 1,450-mile, two-month trip to Helena. People offered rides all the time. After a while, I thought I might learn more by these encounters and accepted––limiting these rides to about the distance of a day’s walk, 20-30 miles.
Present: Did you take notes or record your journey along the way? You write with such great detail.
Dobson: I wrote in my journal for a half-hour to two or more hours every day. The sensual aspects of the trip imprinted me emotionally. I tried to show that in the writing without saying, “The guy made me feel this way…I felt that way about the scenery…”
In terms of people and conversation, I wrote in the journal what I thought I saw and heard, my emotions. I reconstructed conversations from those notes. Even had I possessed a recorder, they would still be reconstructions because we communicate with more than words. But I couldn’t sleep well at night if I had put something into someone’s mouth that they couldn’t or wouldn’t say.
The most difficult thing for us to swallow is that we are all ordinary. We are taught the opposite our whole lives—someone is always better or worse, more talented or less, more original or less...
Present: Walking from place to place offers a much different experience than travel by automobile, train, or plane. Can you share some thoughts about being exposed to the elements. experiencing the outdoors, and how traveling this way affected you?
Dobson: I came to understand the tenuousness of the divide we’ve created between ourselves and the natural world. There is no divide, no us and it. We like to think so. It allows us to put things into easy categories and little boxes--here is good, there is bad; here I am; things I can’t control are over there.
But walking through cities, towns, and rural areas, I learned how humans are nature and vice versa. We are one another and not separated. It’s not always good. Federal- and state-subsidized corporate monocrop agriculture and taxpayer-supported suburban sprawl are forms of pollution, for instance. In another instance, roads bring us into the land, but they are litter or trash themselves. These things allow us to exploit human/natural resources, but they are also bad for us and the nature that is us.
There is a great deal of good, as well. The farmer who still makes a go on a family plot of land. The common history of a town and its river. The people and human history that makes scenery into landscape. The Native American who has learned to take nature into society inimical to him.
Plus, it’s hard to think of myself as separate, better, and in charge when the storm is exhilarating and the rain is draining into my boots. Or when the air is so fresh it tastes of pine resin and cold stream water. Or when the sun warms my face as I fall into an afternoon nap.
Being a speck in the landscape could frighten me or be cause for great joy. One human by him or herself is small and the world is big, seemingly arbitrary, and out of human control. Once I got going, I found the most unruly elements were my own volatile emotions. The outdoors relieved me of what I used to think was my responsibility to be significant. That liberation has really allowed me to live life in a way that’s better for me and all the people around me.
Present: If there was one item that you wish you would have brought at the start of the journey, what would it be?
Dobson: A pair of feet acclimated to walking on hard, flat surfaces.
Present: Would you make a similar journey again?
Dobson: I have several times. Long camping trips with my daughter out West. A canoe trip to St. Louis. Week and weekend trips on the Missouri River. None of this sounds extraordinary because it is not. Anyone can do these things, like the trip in Seldom Seen.
Present: What compelled you to leave your job and child for months to set out across the country?
Dobson: Just plain fear. I was stuck, afraid to let go of the little security I had scraped together for me and my daughter. That security has a great deal of meaning to a working-class guy. I was afraid not to change things because we might be consumed by an unforgiving world. I had a regular job and wanted to fit into that regular-job ideal, but did not. I felt guilty about it, like, “Why can’t I do or be like everyone else?” I was afraid.
When the fear of not changing things grew greater than the fear of doing something different, it was time to go. I have a responsibility show my kids the possibilities, not show them their impossibilities.
It turns out that, in this way, I was exactly like everyone else.
Present: Any other thoughts you'd like to share?
Dobson: Ordinary is good. Ordinary people are a hell of a lot more sophisticated and complex, intelligent and clever—and interesting—than the popular, political, economic, and social culture allows us to see.
The most difficult thing for us to swallow is that we are all ordinary. We are taught the opposite our whole lives—someone is always better or worse, more talented or less, more original or less––like it’s some sin to be common. It’s all been justification for exploiting one another and creating social and economic hierarchies, and then convincing people that’s human nature, which it is not.
I suppose in this way I’m more Jean-Jacques Rousseau than Thomas Hobbes. Life is not “nasty, brutish, and short.” The way I see it, life is too short to let nature’s beauty in each one of us, from the nastiest criminal to the most innocent child or saintly old man, go unnoticed.
Presentation: Patrick Dobson, Author of Seldom Seen
Tuesday, November 3, 6:30 PM
The Kansas City Public Library welcomes author Patrick Dobson for a presentation based on his travelogue Seldom Seen.
In May 1995, Dobson left a steady if deadening job to take a trip, letting chance encounters guide him to a deeper sense of himself and his eventual destination of Helena, Montana. This book charts experiences with seldom-seen people of the small towns, far-flung outposts, and the Great Plains that make up “our America.” Against the majestic sweep of the open plains and endless horizon, his story is one of hope and desperation, richness, and simplicity – a portrait of who we are in the heartland.
Patrick Dobson is a freelance writer, former journalist, and working member of Ironworkers Local Union No. 10 in Kansas City, Missouri.
Admission is free. Call 816.701.3407 to RSVP. Kansas City Library, Plaza, 4801 Main.
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