Way Off the Road Bill Geist Books Review

A combination of Alexis de Tocqueville and Charles Kuralt, Bill Geist has been reporting on "the peculiar charms of small-town America" for 20 years as the roving correspondent for "CBS News Sunday Morning." Geist's "Way Off the Road" is a breezy account of his most recent travels off the beaten, and sometimes left-for-dead, paths.

Skip to next paragraph WAY OFF THE ROAD Discovering the Peculiar Charms of Small-Town America.

By Bill Geist.

Illustrated. 240 pp. Broadway Books. .95.

Related First Chapter: ‘Way Off the Road' (June 24, 2007)

Admittedly, his studies of American culture are not in the same league as Robert and Helen Lynd's "Middletown." But they're a lot funnier.

Geist tells the story of his 5,600-mile R.V. odyssey looking for slightly odd but lovable characters in the towns where everybody knows your name. With wit and kindness, he pins new exotic specimens to the television screen and his book pages - 28 places we might want to visit, or miss.

For example, the sign on the outskirts of one of Geist's stops says: Monowi, Neb. (pop. 2). That "turns out to be something of an exaggeration," he writes. The population had been "trending downward" for decades. It had dropped to seven in the 1990s, and then to Elsie and Rudy Eiler. But Rudy died in 2004. Elsie is the town mayor, the board, the secretary-treasurer, the librarian, the police chief and, her most important job, the keeper of the books for the cemetery. Geist sees one-woman Monowi as representing "self-government as espoused by our founding fathers in its purest form."

Loyalton, Calif. (pop. 817), tucked away in a peaceful valley in the Sierra, is so remote that the publisher of the local newspaper, The Sierra Booster, makes deliveries to his subscribers by airplane. The 92-year-old paperboy, flying a plane that was new in 1949, folds the paper with both hands and steers with his knees, then throws the newspaper out the window as he zooms past.

Rachel, Nev. (pop. 98), makes Geist's gazetteer because it is on the official Extraterrestrial Highway, or Alien Highway. It has experienced more U.F.O. sightings and close encounters of the third kind, or any other kind, than anywhere else in the world. The highway also passes by Area 51, a semisecret government test facility where the stealth bomber was developed. "A disturbing number of our fellow Americans," Geist explains, believe the facility houses "alien spaceships as well as the aliens themselves, dead or alive."

New Glarus, Wis. (pop. 2,111), is the home of Kathy DeBruin, "the Annie Leibovitz of cow portraiture." Geist's description of how DeBruin tries to make her model, Maggie the cow, "slim and angular, while showing off her attractive, umm, mammary glands" could sell a new reality-television bovine makeover series.

Then there's the town where the prairie dog sucker lives: Cortez, Colo. (pop. 7,977). Gay Balfour makes a good living using a powerful Vac-All to suck prairie dogs, the bane of ranch life, out of their holes. He sometimes sells them as exotic pets, fetching 0 apiece in New York. "Doesn't that just beat all?" laughs one rancher, who adds that nobody in Colorado would buy the things. "Like having a pet cockroach in New York," Geist says.

One town I would want to get out of as fast as you can say "Bill Geist" is Wilson, N.C. (pop. 44,405). It passed a law banning dilapidated indoor furniture from having a second life on porches. Wilson is a town where folks rat on neighbors. Geist follows the police while they track down criminal couches and La-Z-Boy recliners. "I wanted to grab a bullhorn and announce: ‘Come out with your hands up!' " Geist says of one bust. Instead he read the chair its "Veranda rights": "You have the right to (continue to) remain silent."

Heading my must-see list is Bithlo, Fla. (pop. 4,626), the home of Figure 8 School Bus Racing. "You know how an 8 crosses there in the middle?" Geist writes. "Racing fans, that's your guarantee of an evening of delightful destruction the whole family can enjoy." If you've ever wondered where school buses go on spring break or summer vacation, this is the town for you.

The book isn't just about oddities. It's also helpful as a travel guide. As he flits about, Geist drops observations about the four essentials of travel: flying there, staying there, eating there, driving there.

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Marvin Kitman lives in a small town (pop. 9,342). His most recent book is "The Man Who Would Not Shut Up: The Rise of Bill O'Reilly."