The Sunset Route

May 15, 2021
Running from pain and yearning for shelter. "Unlike what we see in old movies," Quinn writes in a graceful memoir of life on the rails and on the run, "it's not a good idea to get on or off a moving train. That's called 'catching on the fly, ' and it's dangerous as hell." Very little in the narrative evokes the romance of old movies or even of pilgrimage tales such as Eat, Pray, Love. Raised by a schizophrenic mother in Anchorage, Alaska, the author's childhood was marked by physical abuse (her mother once tried to strangle her), hunger, and poverty so extreme that she often lacked bus fare to get to school. When she was 14, Quinn went to Colorado to live with her coldly judgmental grandparents, who had already taken in her older brother. Even though she finally had enough to eat, she hungered for love, beset by "a loneliness that feels like anemia." At school, she watched other children and their "easy way of speaking to each other, their warm smiles. I can copy their mannerisms, and this seems like a useful skill to have." Still, she was constantly fearful and felt like an outsider, knowing that "humans are wildly unpredictable." Quinn interweaves memories of growing up in the late 1980s and '90s with her adult life on the edges of society: working part-time gigs, living in squalid communes, dumpster diving, shoplifting, hitching rides, and riding the rails to assuage recurrent restlessness or escape haunting memories. In Portland, Oregon, where she first arrived in 2001, at age 19, she saw, for the first time, "another way of being. I am finding good things in the world. Ideas that enchant me. There are moments of possibility." But her stay in Portland was short-lived, and soon she was hiding on freight cars headed east, longing to learn "how to be a person in the world." An intimate memoir of loneliness and hope.

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June 17, 2021
In this raw and painful memoir, author Carrot Quinn, (Thru-Hiking Will Break Your Heart), alternates chapters between two periods in her life as she tells the story of navigating life with a schizophrenic parent. As the children of a single mother suffering from severe mental illness, (her father left early on abdicating all responsibilities), Quinn and her brother learned to survive by stealing food, lying, and suffering through periods of grave uncertainty. After authorities sent her to live with her conservative grandparents, who had little understanding of what she suffered, Quinn eventually set out on her own into a peripatetic existence that included dumpster diving, shoplifting food and clothing (aka "liberating" items) from corporate chain stores and jumping on freight trains for long distance travel. She and her friends, primarily in Portland, Oregon, opine the world's social ills while eschewing capitalism and spending long hours imagining a better life. Quinn is a narrator determined to be emotionally honest although her choices, and their ramifications, tend to raise more questions than answers.

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