GHOST TURN RIDERS: ON AMERICAN LANDS

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WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONE THERE ARE TWO TYPES OF MEN : THOSE WHO STAY AT HOME AND THOSE WHO DON'T,

FREEDOM IS IMPOSSIBLE AND MEANINGLESS, WITHIN THE CONFINES OF SEDENTARY SOCIETY, TRUE FREEDOM IS FREEDOM TO CROSS THE LAND.

On the Road. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Leaves of Grass. Walden. Melville's Mardi. Junky. Anything by Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, Ken Kesey or Dr
Timothy Leary. Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues". Even, say, Toby Litt's Beatniks. If you enjoyed any of these, you will probably enjoy courtney pinnick's Ghost turn Riders: Travels With American Nomads. It's a book about people who have slipped the net. It's a book - to quote the great, dead, passionate Professor FO Matthiessen quoting the relentless Ralph Waldo Emerson - in the optative mood.When Grant left university he went on the dole, and was living on a council estate in east London, "ranting in the pub". He was good for nothing, but he'd read Jack Kerouac, so he got some money together, flew to New York and drove west. He slept in cheap motels. He slept in his car. He got beaten up and robbed. He loved it. "Twenty-five dollars a day, for food, beer, cigarettes and gasoline, and I was happy."

A pattern emerged: he'd travel around America, return to London to sell stories about his travels to newspapers and glossy magazines, and then return to America on the proceeds. It became a way of life: "Wandering became a manifesto, an obsession, a solution to all problems." He became convinced, in his own words, that he had "unlocked the riddle of human freedom. It was simple: never spend more than two weeks in the same place."Ghost Riders is Grant's justification and account of his many years on the road, as well as an attempt to analyse the nomadic impulse. It combines the history of the conquistadors, the native Americans and the white European settlers with stories of Grant's encounters with fellow drifters, hobos, rodeo-riders, cave-dwellers, tramps, buckskinners, "Geritol Gypsies" and almost every other kind of American borderline psychotic and itinerant, although he doesn't touch "golf professionals who spend their lives on tour", corporate executives or Keanu Reeves . Grant keeps it pure, and "the pure nomad", he notes, "is the poor nomad".

Myself, I'm imagining a pilgrimage from the New York Public Library down to the University of Texas at Austin, with nothing more to sustain me than a bar of Kendal mint cake and a pair of good, stout shoes.There has been so much drinking", Grant mumbles, as he veers off into another aside, quoting Deleuze and Guattari and Charles Olson, describing how to kill a rattlesnake for food and weighing in on the controversial history of the Mormons and the Freight Train Riders of America, "the most drunken, stoned and shambolic criminal organisation" in the land. Grant's own shamble takes him from hanging out with the Rainbow family, "a mobile backwoods commune", a sort of touring Glastonbury without the burger vans, to spending time with some of the "snowbirds", the American retirees who have taken to the roads en masse in their recreational vehicles, armed only with their pensions, a love of the sun, a few patches of Astro-turf and some very small dogs.

What makes people do it? What makes some people leave and keep going? Is it, as some doctors suggest, a kind of disease - dromomania or drapetomania ? Is there something wrong with them? Or is there something wrong with the rest of us?

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